The Denial of Death

by Ernest Becker

Every child borrows power from adults and creates a personality by introjecting the qualities of the godlike being. If I am like my all-powerful father I will not die. So long as we stay obediently within the defense mechanisms of our personality, what Wilhelm Reich called “character armor” we feel safe and are able to pretend that the world is manageable. But the price we pay is high. We repress our bodies to purchase a soul that time cannot destroy; we sacrifice pleasure to buy immortality; we encapsulate ourselves to avoid death. And life escapes us while we huddle within the defended fortress of character.

The root of humanly caused evil is not man’s animal nature, not territorial aggression, or innate selfishness, but our need to gain self-esteem, deny our mortality, and achieve a heroic self-image.

Our desire for the best is the cause of the worst.

some individuals are awakening from the long, dark night of tribalism and nationalism and developing what Tillich called a transmoral conscience, an ethic that is universal rather than ethnic.

Hocart once argued that primitives were not bothered by the fear of death;

One of the ironies of the creative process is that it partly cripples itself in order to function. I mean that, usually, in order to turn out a piece of work the author has to exaggerate the emphasis of it, to oppose it in a forcefully competitive way to other versions of truth; and he gets carried away by his own exaggeration,

The problem is to find the truth underneath the exaggeration,

Aristotle somewhere put it: luck is when the guy next to you gets hit with the arrow.

This narcissism is what keeps men marching into point-blank fire in wars: at heart one doesn’t feel that he will die, he only feels sorry for the man next to him.

Freud’s explanation for this was that the unconscious does not know death or time: in man’s physiochemical, inner organic recesses he feels immortal.

In man a working level of narcissism is inseparable from self-esteem, from a basic sense of self-worth. We have learned, mostly from Alfred Adler, that what man needs most is to feel secure in his self-esteem.

When Norman O. Brown said that Western society since Newton, no matter how scientific or secular it claims to be, is still as “religious” as any other,

The question that becomes then the most important one that man can put to himself is simply this:

how conscious is he of what he is doing to earn his feeling of heroism?

heroism is first and foremost a reflex of the terror of death. We admire most the courage to face death;

the fear of death must be present behind all our normal functioning, in order for the organism to be armed toward self-preservation. But the fear of death cannot be present constantly in one’s mental functioning,

Darwinians thought: early men who were most afraid were those who were most realistic about their situation in nature, and they passed on to their offspring a realism that had a high survival value.24 The result was the emergence of man as we know him: a hyperanxious animal who constantly invents reasons for anxiety even where there are none.

Montaigne said, the peasant has a profound indifference and a patience toward death and the sinister side of life; and if we say that this is because of his stupidity, then “let’s all learn from stupidity.”28

“let’s all learn from repression”—but

repression takes care of the complex symbol of death...

Man is literally split in two: he has an awareness of his own splendid uniqueness in that he sticks out of nature with a towering majesty, and yet he goes back into the ground a few feet in order blindly and dumbly to rot and disappear forever. It is a terrifying dilemma to be in and to have to live with.

Pascal’s chilling reflection: “Men are so necessarily mad that not to be mad would amount to another form of madness.”

The Oedipal project is the flight from passivity, from obliteration, from contingency:

the child wants to conquer death by becoming the father of himself,

the creator and sustainer of h...

The mother, at this time, represents literally the child’s life-world. During this period her efforts are directed to the gratification of the child’s wishes, to automatic relief of his tensions and pains.

Kierkegaard taught us, anxiety lures us on, becomes the spur to much of our energetic activity: we flirt with our own growth, but also dishonestly.

We seek stress, we push our own limits, but we do it with our screen against despair and not with despair itself.

Perls conceived the neurotic structure as a thick edifice built up of four layers.

first two layers are the everyday layers, the tactics that the child learns to get along in society by the facile use of words to win ready approval and to placate others and move them along with him:

The third

it is the “impasse” that covers our feeling of being empty and lost,

Underneath this layer is the fourth and most baffling one: the “death” o...

My soul was only apt and disposed to great things; but souls to souls are like apples to apples, one being rotten rots another.

now we find that psychiatric and religious perspectives on reality are intimately related. For one thing they grow out of one another historically,

“Freud had to live and write before the earlier work of Kierkegaard could be correctly understood and appreciated.”

Kierkegaard’s: how is a person being enslaved by his characterological lie about himself?

Christendom he too is a Christian, goes to church every Sunday, hears and understands the parson, yea, they understand one another; he dies; the parson introduces him into eternity for the price of $10—but a self he was not, and a self he did not become….

For the immediate man does not recognize his self, he recognizes himself only by his dress, … he recognizes that he has a self only by externals.18

What Kierkegaard means here is that the development of the person is a development in depth from a fixed center in the personality, a center that unites both aspects of the existential dualism—the self and the body. But this kind of development needs precisely an acknowledgment of reality, the reality of one’s limits:

What really is lacking is the power to … submit to the necessary in oneself, to what may be called one’s limit.

perfectly definite something,

On the contrary, he lost himself, owing to the fact that this self was seen fantastically reflected in the possible.

“culturally normal” man, the one who dares not stand up for his own meanings because this means too much danger, too much exposure. Better not to be oneself, better to live tucked into others, embedded in a safe framework of social and cultural obligations and duties.

The depressed person is so afraid of being himself, so fearful of exerting his own individuality, of insisting on what might be his own meanings, his own conditions for living, that he seems literally stupid.

If one will compare the tendency to run wild in possibility with the efforts of a child to enunciate words, the lack of possibility is like being dumb … for without possibility a man cannot, as it were, draw breath.

The loss of possibility signifies: either that everything has become necessary to man or that everything has become trivial.

torture of depressive psychosis: to remain steeped in one’s failure and yet to justify it, to continue to draw a sense of worthwhileness out of it.‡

philistinism is what we would call “normal neurosis.” Most men figure out how to live safely within the probabilities of a given set of social rules. The Philistine trusts that by keeping himself at a low level of personal intensity he can avoid being pulled off balance by experience; philistinism works, as Kierkegaard said, by “tranquilizing itself with the trivial.” His analysis was written almost a century before Freud spoke of the possibility of “social neuroses,” the “pathology of whole cultural communities.”

Remember